Parashat Toledot – 5785

How does it feel to be unfavored?

Sadly, this question is explored at various points throughout the Torah, especially in discussions of conflicted relationships among siblings, who so often appear to be locked in conflict over the apparently scarce resource of parental (or Parental) love.

Our first story of sibling rivalry in the Torah comes in the account of the first sibling pair, Cain and Abel. They each offer sacrifices to God, but Abel’s sacrifice is accepted by God while Cain’s is not, and this sends Cain into a rage and he kills his brother. (Genesis 4:8) This story is our first indication that siblings in the Torah are likely to see their relationships in a zero-sum context; when one sibling wins, the other sibling necessarily loses.

This dynamic is especially evident in this week’s Torah portion of Toledot. Isaac and Rebecca have two twin sons, Esau and Jacob, and we read that each parent chooses one of the children as a favorite: “Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game; and Rebecca loved Jacob.” (Genesis 25:28) Throughout the Torah, whenever the root אהב, “love,” is used in the context of the relationship between parents and children, as it is in this verse, it refers to a parent’s preferential love for a particular child.

The root אהב, or “love,” has an opposite: the root שנא, which is usually translated as “hate.” However, a close examination of the usage of this word suggests that it is not always referring to the strong negative feelings that we associate with hatred. The word שנואה s’nuah, usually translated as “hated,” is used in two contexts in the Torah to describe the relatively unloved counterpart to someone who is loved. In next week’s Torah portion of Vayeitzei, Leah is described as “s’nuah,” (Genesis 29:31) even though we never hear that Jacob actually hates her — he simply prefers Leah’s sister Rachel, so Leah is merely relatively unloved. (Genesis 29:30 even implies that Jacob does in fact love Leah, but loves Rachel more). Similarly, the book of Deuteronomy describes a man with two wives, “one ahuvah and one s’nuah,” usually translated as “one loved and one hated.” (Deuteronomy 21:15) Again, however, the context suggests that the word s’nuah is not referring to intensely negative feelings that the husband may have towards her, but simply that she is relatively unloved.

If, in fact, the Torah uses the same root to mean “hated” and “relatively unloved,” we can better understand the intense reactions of siblings in the Torah to the experience of being unfavored. Even if they are not actually hated by their parents, the fact that a different sibling is loved and preferred means that they feel hated by comparison. The paradigm throughout the book of Genesis is that love is a limited commodity. I was shocked that I was unable to find any passage in the Tanakh in which a parent professes love for more than one child at one time.

This fact, that feeling unfavored feels like feeling hated, may have a lot to do with the strong feelings that drive Cain to kill Abel, and that drive Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery. We can hold these perpetrators to account for their destructive actions while also understanding their frustration. And this also may explain Esau’s desperate cry to his father Isaac in this week’s Torah portion, upon realizing that his brother Jacob has committed identity fraud against him and stolen his blessing: “Do you have only one blessing, father? Bless me also, father!” (Genesis 21:38) For all that Esau gets a negative reputation in rabbinic literature, he appears to be the first, maybe the only, person in the Torah to suggest that it’s madness to believe that love and blessing must be limited. Esau has to reiterate the same request three times (Genesis 21:34, 36, and 38) before his father finally gives him the additional blessing that he seeks.

Today, Esau’s solution to this problem seems obvious: of course parents have more than one blessing to give to their children. Of course parental love does not need to be a scarce resource. Our Torah portion is an annual reminder — especially to parents — of our responsibility to regard love as non-comparative and non-competitive.
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Rabbi Robert Scheinberg, Ph.D., is the Rabbi in Residence at the Academy for Jewish Religion, where he teaches courses in Jewish Liturgy, as well as the Rabbi of the United Synagogue of Hoboken. Rabbi Scheinberg was a member of the editorial committees for Mahzor Lev Shalem and Siddur Lev Shalem, the prayer books used in many Conservative congregations.